Explore "Astrology and Alchemy" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
It is curious to mark how instinctively the reason has always pointed out / to men the ultimate end of the various sciences, and how immediately / afterwards they have set to work, like children, to realize that end by / inadequate means. Now they applied to their appetites, now to their / passions, now to their fancy, now to the understanding, and lastly, to the / intuitive reason again. There is no doubt but that astrology of some sort / or other would be the last achievement of astronomy: there must he chemical / relations between the planets; the difference of their magnitudes compared / with that of their distances is not explicable otherwise; but this, though, / as it were, blindly and unconsciously seen, led immediately to fortune- / telling and other nonsense. So alchemy is the theoretic end of chemistry: / there must be a common law, upon which all can become each and each all; / but then the idea was turned to the coining of gold and silver.